The Early Modern Center of the University of
California at Santa Barbara invites paper proposals for our tenth annual
Conference, "The Future of Literary Studies, 1500-1800." The conference
will take place on March 11-12, 2011 at UCSB.

The
idea of "the new” has been powerful in early modern literary studies,
mobilizing critical innovation and reshaping research practices.
Consider for example the New Historicism, as framed by Stephen
Greenblatt and the late Richard Helgerson, or the 1987 collection The
New Eighteenth Century, edited by Felicity Nussbaum and Laura Brown.
More recently, exciting work has emerged from perspectives as different
as the New Economic Studies or the New Formalism. The question we
propose for this conference is simple: where is early modern studies
headed? What’s next? Does the future lie in advancing or revisiting
existing approaches, such as still newer historicism, or something
different altogether? In addition to theoretical explorations of new
approaches, we are also interested in papers that apply these
approaches.

This
two-day conference will consist of panel discussions, as well keynote
talks followed by a roundtable discussion that will allow participants
to engage and reflect on the issues raised throughout the conference. In
addition to panels, roundtable, and papers, the conference will include
an evening of dramatic performance celebrating the tenth anniversary of
UCSB’s Early Modern Center!

We
invite proposals for papers that broadly speak to "The Future of
Literary Studies, 1500-1800” as well as those that put new approaches
into practice. We hope to include papers from a range of critical and
disciplinary contexts, and invite papers that draw from literatures that
cross ethnic, regional, and national boundaries. Possible directions,
approaches and topics may include, but are not limited to, the
following: the canon, new formalism, ecocriticism, affect theory,
cognitive approaches, religion, politics, transatlantic/global studies,
Middle Eastern/Mediterranean studies, popular culture (ballads,
pamphlets, broadsides, etc), digital humanities, repertory studies,
material history/history of the book, pedagogy.